


Error Detected

by tealmoon



Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, No Mercy Route, POV Second Person, Video Game Mechanics, Vomiting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-10
Updated: 2016-03-10
Packaged: 2018-05-25 20:46:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,270
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6209464
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tealmoon/pseuds/tealmoon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If you can't win, you might as well cheat. What can go wrong?</p><p>(Quite a lot, actually.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Error Detected

            Undyne has to die. You’ve never wanted to kill any monster as much as her at this moment. You love her, and she’s the coolest person you’ve ever seen, especially in that jagged armor, avenging all the other people you loved and killed, but she needs to die _right now_ and you can’t make it happen.

            Everything has gotten so boring. By now, Monster Kid has lost their appeal, more than you could have imagined at the start. Nothing gets them to stutter anything new, and you haven’t collected any of that free EXP. No matter how you attack, even attempting to shove them off the bridge before they can say a word, Undyne always saves them. You’ve exhausted everything they could possibly offer, but you still have to sit through it to reach her. Between that and your many deaths, you’re getting worn down. The more times you reload, the worse your head pounds. The Player’s getting angry—at you, at itself, at Undyne and the whole of Waterfall. You need a better strategy.

As pretty as your ballet shoes are, it’s really hard to land any kicks with all those spears coming at you, and a wet bridge underfoot. A few times, you had fallen off altogether, with no flowers to catch you that time. (And you had wanted to see what was down there, it was a place you had never been, somewhere entirely new. Everything in your soul wanted to explore it, but you can’t doing that right now. How would you even get down without dying?) Maybe you should give up on the shoes and go back to the notebook. It’s fun too, in its own way: you can kill a fierce soldier in heavy armor just by biffing her in the shins with a waterlogged pile of cardboard and paper.

            You have to do something different— Undyne has killed you twenty-seven times now. Should you switch weapons? Should you head back to Snowdin for more cinnamon bunnies? (Though, the last tray behind the counter was looking a little bare when you had last gone in, with no one left to make more.) Should you get out the pie going stale in your box, even though you wanted to keep it so badly, wanted to see how Asgore would react if you ate it in front of him—

            There’s a little sound that you barely hear over the sound of rushing water, and the weight in your pockets is different. You have to push the frills of your tutu aside to reach and find more than just light pastries crushed and wrapped in napkins. There’s

            something

            else.

            You pull out a knife that catches on the fabric of your shorts, a tarnished chain tangled around the handle. AT 99, DF 99. You aren’t supposed to have these yet, this is wrong, but before you can move, you’re filled with determination, and File Saved. Even looking at them makes your head and hands ache.

            You throw them off the cliff. File Loaded.

            You throw them off the cliff. File Loaded.

            You throw them off the cliff. File Loaded.

            **Put on the locket, use the knife.**

            So many loads in such a short time have made you dizzy, and you nearly faint, sagging against the wall.

            **Put it on, use it.**

            You remember these far better than the first time, when your memories were still muddled and buried under Frisk’s consciousness. Asriel had given you this locket a few months after you met, when he had started calling you his best friend, even though you still flinched every time he hugged you. His locket had fallen from the human world, a shitty plastic heart that had needed a replacement chain. Yours, on the other hand, had been made and engraved just for you, and at the time, you could only think that you didn’t deserve a golden heart on a golden chain when Asriel wore a piece of human garbage.

            The knife is the one you carried with you, the one you nearly impaled yourself on when you fell into Ebott. ~~Your parents~~ Toriel and Asgore had taken it away, the first time they ever found you digging it into your forearm, and you couldn’t figure out why Asgore had kept it all those years.

            Your fingers pull at the tutu’s elastic, leaving smears of dust on your sweater and shorts as you work it off, and scarcely as it leaves your fingers, File Saved. It’s harder to remove your ballet shoes—after one terrible death tripping on an unraveled ribbon, you started to quadruple-tie the knots, and your hands are shaking more than they had the first time you beat a Froggit into dust, you and Frisk both crying so hard that you could barely see your target. But eventually, your shoes come off, and they too are dropped into the abyss past the cliff edge.

            You pull the locket over your head and wrap your fingers around the knife’s handle. You want to march forward to Undyne, to plant that knife into her remaining eye and dig it out, to see if it’ll fall to dust the second it leaves her body, or if you could keep it as a memento. Frisk would scold you if they were awake, but you can’t help it, you’re just so sick of fighting and dying against her. There’s an exhausting pause, your chest burns and your fingers cramp, and you don’t get up. The Player isn’t done yet.

            You take out the bisicles and the cinnamon bunnies and line them up on the ground. They’re right there still, you could pick them back up, they’re still wrapped up so it’s not like they’re even dirty, not that you’ve ever cared about a little grit on your food. But you feel a new weight in your pockets, and you don’t want to look and find some new aberration, you really don’t, but you CHECK your inventory.  

            There’s a steak from MTT Resort that you’ve never seen outside of the display case—it looks unnaturally shiny and leaves a streak of glitter left on your fingers when you poke it. There’s a snowball in a little baggy, when you know that the three you took are still in the box. And pie, so much pie, enough that if you pushed it together, it would almost equal a whole one. You can already smell it through the cling wrap, and you tear one slice free and jam it into your mouth, gagging and choking, barely able to chew. You’ve left traces of dust on it, bitter on top of the sweet, and you wonder if ~~your mom~~ Toriel would have liked to have her dust spread on her pie.

            It’s near-impossible to chew with your mouth so full, and you struggle not to spit it out. The first time you ever had this pie, you could only manage half a slice and had cried thinking that it was a waste, and you would have to sneak into the trash to get the rest. Instead, Toriel had put the plate back in the fridge, and Asgore petted your hair, and Asriel clung to your side, begging to know what was wrong.

            The first piece finally goes down, painfully, in big chunks scratching your throat, and you take the second one slower, in several sticky bites. The third piece hurts a lot, and your stomach is heavy and sour, but you can’t stop. There’s no point in stopping, not when more pieces fill your inventory to replace them and no save loading to punish you. You could eat a whole pie, and no one would stop you or care.

            You’re holding the fourth in your hands when you start to feel off-balance and achy. You slump against the wall, plucking at the plastic wrap a little, before your mouth waters, sours, floods. You bend over and try to vomit on the ground instead of your lap. It still tastes like cinnamon and butterscotch, and the bigger pieces of crust scrape just as much going up as down. Your hands are occupied holding you up, so you can’t hold back your hair or locket, now both splattered with puke. There’s a little on your dingy sweater too, and more when you wipe your mouth and chin on a sleeve. You could hike back to the streams around the echo flowers to wash it off, but you have a fight to get to, after all. You spit out as much as you can and try to wipe off any big chunks.

            “That’s the grossest thing I’ve ever seen,” Frisk mumbles, and you’re startled into a laugh that shoots butterscotch-cinnamon out of your nose. _This,_ of all things, is what finally wakes them up?

            “This is nothing, you should have seen me with the flowers. I started pissing blood--" Frisk squawks before you can continue, and you’re still giggling a little as you stagger off to the bridge, again.

            You die, of course. Marching into battle straight after a puking fit wasn’t much of a strategic move, even with better food and equipment. You step into spears that should be easy to block, you forget the patterns you’ve been memorizing, and you whiff your stabs. The knife and locket don’t help at all when you stumble and start retching again, just a thin stream of butterscotch that tastes so much like buttercups underneath that you fall over and don’t move as she cocks her head and rains hundreds of spears down on you.

            File Loaded. You still have the locket and knife, and your pockets fill up. You’re cleaner, and your stomach doesn’t hurt. Of course you try again.

*

            When you first fought Undyne and found that she was an actual challenge, you imagined how exciting it would be to kill her. You had visions of doing pirouettes through her dust, kicking it up in the air, so powerful and graceful and alive. But, thirty-three deaths later, you just feel tired. She melted instead of dusting, and it’s viscous when you poke your sneaker into it, not even a proper puddle you could splash in. Even if you wanted to do a victory ballet, your tutu and shoes are long gone, washed away someplace you’ll never reach. You shouldn’t care.

            For now, you trudge back rather than going on to Hotland. You need to return to your box—you still have that extra snowball, though you ate almost everything else. It’s not going to last very long in the heat, so you need to save it. It’s hard to walk with your soul screaming to progress, and you stumble the whole way, your fingers stiff around the knife’s handle.

            Gerson isn’t in the shop when you peek in, so he must have evacuated when you were fighting Undyne, and took his merchandise with him—there’s not even any spare gold left, though you poke around the clutter to be sure. He didn’t take the box though, so you kneel down to put away the snowball.

            It doesn’t even register at first that the walls are flickering. You’re light-headed from standing up, and it’s just for a few seconds, the blue turning into grey, reminding you of New Home. (It had never looked so grey when you had run down those halls hand-in-hand with Asriel.) You turn around and see a grey door set into a wall it didn’t belong in, so that the stone around the frame cracks and wavers and refuses to settle, moving like an optical illusion. It isn’t supposed to be there, not that it’s supposed to be anywhere.

            The door opens by itself. Inside is a bulging, oily darkness that pulls back into a figure, a smile, a dozen hands gesturing all at once. Each pair of hands says something different, but the pair hovering in front of his chest moves the slowest. For all that you had learned to sign (he had taught you, why are you only remembering this now?), it’s hard to understand any of it. The door shuts itself behind you.

            You don’t remember _him_ very well, but his hands are familiar, though he didn’t used to have this many. The only pair still attached isn’t moving, limp at his sides. You don’t remember Gaster having holes in his hands either, but he has a neat circle taken out of every palm.

            A long time ago, he had given you a sign name, after conferring with Asriel to choose something fitting, but now he fingerspells your name instead. (Over his shoulder, one pair of hands keeps repeating it, Chara Chara Chara _Frisk._ )

            Your eyes dart from one gesture to the next, unable to choose one thing to watch when so many fingers say so many different things, and your attention keeps locking onto the holes in his palms. At a certain angle, they look like they don’t go all the way through: instead of seeing the white walls behind it, something dark shifts inside them, like slowly moving ripples, or something falling…

            Gaster snaps his fingers, all of them at once, and the combined noise makes you flinch back into awareness. “Now, Chara, I don’t normally do this, but there are some things I cannot allow. Regardless of whether it is your fault, I don’t want these behaviors to continue. I’m very disappointed in you all.”

            What is he talking about? Frisk seems just as confused as you are, and you wait for him to continue on. Instead, one hand escapes from its orbit around him and plucks the knife from your grasp. You weren’t in a FIGHT, so you weren’t holding on very well, and you stare dumbfounded as he pulls it out of reach. No one has ever disarmed you before, and you’ve never seen Frisk’s weapon slot empty before. The empty space in your menu looms in your head, getting bigger and bigger, and stats flicker in the corner of your vision.

            But when another hand comes down and grabs the locket, you’re startled back into your body. Without the knife, you can only claw and punch at his hands, and for a little while, it works, until you hear a familiar _ding!_ Your soul erupts into blue, so heavy that you nearly fall to your knees. While Papyrus’ blue magic had allowed you to jump, you can barely remain standing now. Through blurry vision, you seek out the locket, the one spot of color in the white room, and you try to reach your hand up towards it, even as your arm shakes under the magical weight.

            “You can have these items when it’s the proper time, and no sooner. Don’t do this again.” Gaster does some strange sleight of hand, and the locket, your locket, seems to fall through the hole in his palm and does not emerge through the other side. You’re so focused on it, trying to find a hint of gold in that void, that it takes a moment to register the knife.

            For some reason, you imagined it would be different—you’ve never stabbed a human, but you’ve thought about it and read it a thousand times in all the novels the librarian said you were too young to read but still checked out to you. But Gaster stabbing you isn’t like that at all.

            You expect it to be easier, for some reason, as if your stomach was a knife block for a blade to slide neatly inside. Instead, his hand strains to get it through the skin and to pull it out again, pushing it back in a few centimeters over, jiggling the handle a little. You doubt the good doctor Gaster has ever used a knife like this in his life.

            There’s not as much blood as you expected either, but enough, bright against your striped sweater. Without the locket, without any armor at all, your DF is nothing, and your HP drains away. You’re too paralyzed to move; the distance between your hand and your pocket, your pocket and your mouth, is too far to travel. It doesn’t hurt that much, though. You mostly feel warm, like there’s a star in your gut, pulsing out of the thin stab wounds. Frisk wails, but the sound seems to take years to arrive, and it’s muffled like there’s walls of glass between you.

            He brings the knife down a third time.

            When you come back to yourself, you can hear ~~your dad~~ Asgore calling out in the void, telling you not to give up, to stay strong. You should wake up now, at the bridge, at your last SAVE, but it gets even darker, somehow. Your soul is still blue, and you stagger and fall to the nonexistent floor, as a dozen hands, leaking magic through the palms, press the Reset button above you.

*

            Frisk opens their eyes to a beam of sunlight, pollen drifting around them, the faintest breeze moving down into the stale air of the Ruins. It takes a moment to sink in, but they sigh heavily, barely moving except to pluck a flower growing beside their cheek. You expect them to pop it into their mouth (it’s a marigold, it wouldn’t hurt them anyway), but they just strip away the petals, one by one.

            “He killed us,” they say softly, and you wonder if Asriel can hear it in the next room and if he’d ever break script and come look. “He sent us all the way back here. And I’ve never seen him before.” Their voice is full of awe, the annoyance draining away, and you can feel yourself being drawn in as well, caught up in the idea of something new.

            They roll over onto their stomach and grab another flower, crushing more as they kick their feet. You stomp down on your irritation—it’s your grave, your memorial flowers—because this is Frisk’s time in your shared body. Let them do what they want, until you have control again and they go back into the dark part of your shared head where they can’t even twitch their fingers and don’t have to watch people die. That’s the easiest way to play the game.

            “We have to see him again,” Frisk says, and there’s no other choice. What would Gaster say? What would his dust look like? “Do we need to kill everyone to see him? Do we have to get all of those items again? I know he said that we shouldn’t do it, but we have to know what’ll happen. What do we do to get him not to kill us? He has a blue attack, so does he know Papyrus?” Frisk goes on and on, and it’s more words than anyone has managed to pull from them than collectively in the past four runs. You had been worrying that they were losing the will to speak out loud altogether.

            Frisk heaves themself up and retrieve their dropped stick. For a minute, they just stare at it, turning it around in their hand. “Well?” you ask, a little confused. Are they just stalling?

            “I thought maybe it would turn into the knife,” Frisk whispers, peeling away a sliver of bark. “And what would happen if we had the locket when we first see Asriel? There’s so much we have to try now.”

            There are so many possibilities waiting for you still that you and Frisk will never stay on the surface at this rate. The Player won’t let you until you’ve seen it all.

 

            Maybe you're okay with that.

**Author's Note:**

> At this point, they've been through a full pacifist run and several neutral ones. This is their first no mercy. 
> 
> Let me know if I've missed a tag or a typo, I'm pretty rusty at this.


End file.
